5 Things You Need To Know About… SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the keystone to marketing a business online, because SEO is what gets you seen. Without effective SEO, you’re pretty much just talking to yourself.

Here are 5 key facts about SEO…

The goal of SEO is to get the attention of the search engines – You want the search engines to see your website and then show you in the results when someone is searching for what you offer.

There are two types of SEO – On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO
• On-Page SEO is all the things that should be “baked into” your website
• Off-Page SEO is everything you do to promote and drive people to your site

Effective SEO is built into your website – Today, search engines look for more than just keywords (although they’re still important): things like useful, original content, how well your site works (does it load quickly?), whether it’s mobile friendly, etc.

You maximize your SEO with links to your website – One of the most important keys to SEO is to build links to your site from other high-quality, trusted sites, including social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), online directory listings like Google My Business and Bing for Business pages, and listings on sites like Yelp and MerchantCircle. (You should also be aware that if your business information is incorrect on these pages, it can have a negative impact on your SEO.)

SEO is different than SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – The easiest way to explain the difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO is free and SEM is paid for.
• With SEO, you do all the things we discussed above (or hire someone to them for you) to get listed as high as possible in the organic search results.
• With SEM, you pay to place ads at the top of the search results page. (And, yes, SEM is a powerful way to increase your SEO.)

There’s a lot more to SEO, but hopefully these basics give you an overview of what SEO is and why it’s so important to your success, both online and offline. The fact is, the business battlefield today is the search results page – you win the battle when you appear higher on the page than your competition… and you do that with effective SEO.